smashcon | Warmth, a divine intervention

Title: Warmth, a divine intervention
Rating: i.e. G
Prompt: “If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.”
Fandom/Series: Violet Evergarden
Word Count: 4102
Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, profit from the story and all creative rights to the characters belong to their original creator(s).
Summary: Violet's first Yule, with the CH Postal Company.

Warmth, a divine intervention

To Violet, her first Yule in Leiden was much like her first Thanksgiving in Machtig.

That is, to say, it was another city’s tradition, not hers to celebrate, and it meant little to nothing by way of a calendar event, until President Hodgins closed the CH Postal Company early on Friday afternoon and declared that they would have their first company Yule party.

“Oh, only a month late,” Iris muttered beside Violet. The Auto Memory Dolls had been charged with assembling the wassailing booklets for the company workers, which Cattleya confided was actually a test run of next Yule’s corporate gifts (in the hope that the company would expand significantly to participate in seasonal gift giving at all).

Violet flipped through the dates mentally, and agreed with Iris that, yes, it was precisely four weeks to the day Yule was scheduled on the standard calendar.

“And,” Iris continued, “we’re scribes, not book binders!”

“Hole punching and some ribbon is hardly book binding,” Erica pointed out. A good length of red ribbon they were using to bind the booklets together had found its way into her hair, and Erica looked very pleased with the new look – or she was looking very happy as she carefully penned Benedict Blue on the cover of the wassailing booklet she was finishing.

“It is not what we were paid to do as Auto Memory Dolls here.”

“The reception staff are putting up wreaths,” Violet said from the typewriter. “Surely that was not in their administrative duties?”

Cattleya had decided that Violet could type the wassailing songs and everyone else with more flexible fingers could assemble the booklets. There had been protest from Violet (who said her new prosthetic joints were as good as her previous set, and it was not lacking in the dexterity needed to use hole punches, tie ribbon or assemble booklets) and Iris (who insisted that typing, compared to binding, was at least a task worthy of an Auto Memory Doll), and finally President Hodgins who was sick of the hubbub, assigned everyone a role, and then pulled Cattleya out of the room to manage catering.

“Reception staff keep a neat front-of-house,” Iris said with a sniff. “So I’d say putting up Yule decorations in the front-of-house certainly counts as part of their work.”

“Let’s call this a team effort and try to make a late Yule a good Yule.” Erica said. She finished Cattleya Baudelaire with a clean flourish. And then, looking at Violet quizzically, added, “You haven’t celebrated Yule, have you? You didn’t know about the new year air show here after all.”

“I had no opportunity to observe Yule,” Violet said, and she thought of Mastig’s Thanksgiving night, and the emerald brooch that blazed like the fire of the Major’s eyes, and wondered if she could match that feeling with a Leiden Yule night.

The Major had said the two of them would do so once the war was over, in a proper house, perhaps the Bougainvillea family home with his mother, instead of a field camp or battlefield. Once it was rumoured that homesick Northern and Southern soldiers broke rank and fraternised during the Yule season, and that had been incomprehensible to Violet, that their soldiers could share food and peace with the enemy one day, and to kill or be killed by them the next. The Major considered those events as nothing but a falsified military report, and Violet agreed. A mutual day of peace between weeks of war sounded impossible then.

Somewhere, in the back of her mind, Hodgins whispered, you’re burning, and Captain Dietfried Bougainvillea scowled, those hands of yours that ended so many lives, and Violet told them both, if I burn, it has been a long winter, and I must keep these hands that are typing out wassailing songs warm.

“Violet? You’ve gotten that far-off look on your face again.”

She had stopped typing and had wrapped a hand around her brooch received in that Mastigian Thanksgiving. Once, she had believed the Major had gifted her with that because she had been so instrumental in the liberation of Bociaccia. Now, she wondered if the Major hadn’t talked about his gratitude for her military service and meant I love you that whole time.

“I was thinking,” Violet said firmly, her face turned to the ceiling, “about how glad I am to observe Yule with everyone, even if it is a month to the day on when Yule is characteristically celebrated.”

Iris brushed it aside with a dismissive flap of her hand, “Ah well, we know why it was put off, and I can’t fault the president for it. No point throwing a company party when company employees were running off to Ctrigall or sailing off to peace talks.”

Erica kicked Iris from under the table.

“Ow, ow, ow—hey! What was that for? It was true!”

“What a thing to bring up! If Cattleya said that ordeal wasn’t fit for the newspapers, how is it any more suitable for the office!”

“Say what? That was our postal workers out there, of course we can talk about it!”

Violet turned to them and said, “President Hodgins put off a Yule party for me?”

“And Cattleya and Benedict, they were away as well,” Erica added, righting her glasses after Iris batted at them in retaliation. “But I mean—of course we couldn’t have a Yule party without you. Until that pilot telegrammed us with your whereabouts after your adventure north, we were worried sick. Imagine trying to celebrate Yule in that mood.”

“You were worried that I wouldn’t return?”

She tested the syllables in her mouth, the way the words rolled off her tongue, and felt it very foreign. She was the soldier maiden of Leidenschaftlich once, and the Auto Memory Doll of CH Postal Company now, and striding into the battlefield was as necessary as traversing the continent to meet a client. Equally important was returning to base, ahead of or beside the Major. She had never spent many thoughts on who would be waiting for her at the postal company, besides the President as her employer.

“Of course,” they chorused.

“You’re our co-worker,” Iris said.

“And an important part of the Auto Memory Dolls team,” Erica said.

Violet opened her mouth, ready to return the sentiment of unity and teamwork, when Benedict burst in the room, crowing about how long the receptionists had taken to finally decorate the first floor, and who wanted spice cake and mulled wine because Cattleya was back, and he couldn’t wait to inaugurate the first Yule celebration of CH Postal Company by getting the president well and truly drunk until he might resign from embarrassment.

---

The receptionists had decked the halls – that was Cattleya’s term for it, even though there was only one room and Violet would hardly call it a hall. There was a great wide trestle table on the open space of the first floor, and on it, the end of the seasonal holly and handfuls of sweet-smelling pine needles strewn over its surface. The fresh wreathes from the florists were long out of stock, but Nerine and Lillian fashioned a few rustic wreathes from pine branches and pine cones, and Erica tied the last of her booklet-binding ribbons into wide looping bows to add colour.

“Looks good,” Benedict said as he hefted a box of taper candles into the hall. “Matches the one in your…”

He gestured at her ear.

Erica turned the colour of her ribbon.

Iris looked ready to gleefully interject when Cattleya swooped in and dragged them off to help with unpacking the food.

“Give the kids some space,” Cattleya crowed as Iris protested, “But did you see her face? She lit up like fireworks!”

Violet, still trying to process Erica’s flustering as she was suddenly given plenty of space alone with Benedict, said nothing.

“I don’t understand,” Violet said finally. She heaved a crate of bottled drinks in her arms while Iris and Cattleya picked through the paper bags of Yule foods.

“Say what now?”

“We’ve given Erica an opportune moment to share her happiness with Benedict, so why was it that she looked so panicked?”

Cattleya laughed and whapped her on the shoulder. “My dear Violet, you’ve never seen a confession of love have you?”

She had, and Gilbert had been dying all the while. But that was hardly something she wanted to voice aloud to Cattleya.

Thinking on it, when she had memorised young Aiden Field’s final words and formalised Princess Charlotte’s public letters, it was love that had already been known and declared.

She glanced at Iris, who looked rightfully disheartened. Doubtless, she was thinking of the confession that had soured Violet’s first trip with her to Kazaly.

Where Violet had stood in the shadow of ignorance and wondered what the Major had meant as he ordered her to live and be free, Erica stood in uncertainty. It might have been fear on her face as Violet, Iris and Cattleya left her behind – but fear was a necessary thing. It was fear that lined her teeth before a battle and compelled her to charge in and charge back to Gilbert, and fear again that spurred her along on her trek back to Intense in search of him. A bright burst of fear, before the decision was made.

She set her crate of drinks down.

“We should give them more time,” she decided. “And stay here, so Erica maintains her space.”

Iris shrugged and returned her armful of parcels to their box. “Fine by me. Do we just stand in the cold doing nothing the whole time?”

Violet had years of experience standing in the cold doing nothing beside wait for the key moment to charge into battle. She supposed it was a little unfair to expect her co-workers to be happy to do the same.

“We could have some of the spice cake and mulled wine Benedict promised us,” she suggested after a pause.

“The little weasel!” Cattleya exclaimed, “Claudia and I were keeping that grocery list secret so that it would be a surprise!”

She seemed so put off by Benedict’s slip of tongue that Violet felt reassurance was in order. “It is no matter,” she said as she picked out three bottles from her crate, “I have yet to celebrate Yule. Everything in your Yule grocery list will be a surprise to me.”

“I suppose that can’t be helped. Did you never celebrate Yule, truly?” Cattleya fished out apples from paper bags and passed one to Iris. “No spice cake until we’re back inside. It hasn’t been sliced yet. But we can have these apples for Yule.” She tossed one up like a spinning red ball, quick-handed like a street juggler, and bounced it to Violet. “For your information, Violet, these represent the sun for Yule celebrations.”

Violet accepted the offered apple. “The sun,” she repeated.

“And this is an apple fortune telling trick,” Cattleya continued. She twisted the apple stem and counted down the letters of the alphabet with each twist, until it stopped at the snapping of the stem.

“Well, ‘G’,” she said wryly. “Only one off.”

Iris peered dubiously at the apple and its snapped stem. “How is that fortune telling?”

Cattleya crunched into her apple with a shrug. “A hometown tradition. We used to believe that the letter the stem snaps off on will be a letter of the initials of the one you love.”

While Iris frantically commenced stem twisting, Violet asked, “Why is the sun important?” In her mind, she already knew why the sun was important, but how it was important to Yule, which her co-workers were taking great pains to introduce to her, seemed necessarily if she had festive letters to write in future.

Cattleya pondered long and hard. Beside them, Iris’ apple stem snapped off at ‘S’ and she let out a wail of despair.

“There, there,” Violet said while Iris, sobbing, buried her face in her hands. “I’m sure it doesn’t stand for ‘Snow’.”

“Can we go back inside now?” she wailed, “How long does Erica need to take to cosy up to him?!”

---

As it turned out, no one knew how long Erica needed to confess to Benedict, because as three-quarters of the CH Postal Company’s Auto Memory Dolls team heaved groceries inside, she had done nothing beyond switching the ribbon to the other side of her hair.

“Please tell me you know some fortune telling about that?” Iris said in a stage-whisper, as the four of them unpacked and plated a small feast onto the pine needle-strewn table.

“Spiced cake and ginger bread for the end of the harvest season,” Cattleya explained to Violet, who was listening attentively, “and sharing mulled wine and apple cider with others to celebrate a community. Sliced pork and turkey because… actually, I’m not sure. Who doesn’t enjoy sliced pork or turkey though?”

“Cattleya!”

“I’m busy!”

“Explaining Yule traditions? She can pick them up as we go along!”

“This is important!”

“So’s this!” Iris made a cutting gesture at Erica, who was humming to herself.

“Oh, me?” Erica said, her mouth curled in a smile. She touched the ribbon in her hair reverently. “Benedict said it framed my face better if I switched the bow to the other side. What do you think?”

“That’s—that’s all… all you talked about—”

“The ribbon is very becoming on you,” Violet said over Iris’ splutters. “Did you have sufficient space to discuss other matters?”

“Of course,” Erica continued. She divided the spice cake into neat geometrical slices. “We talked about our favourite wassailing songs, and then he joked about drinking the president under the table…”

To Violet, President Hodgins’ upcoming inebriation did not seem like a joke.

“Benedict can certainly try,” the president said, looming ominously behind them. “Sadly for him, I’ve lost my fondness for the stuff.”

While Erica bowed profusely and apologised with as many delicately crafted phrases her training as an Auto Memory Doll had bestowed on her, the CH Postal Company staff gathered around the festive trestle table for the inaugural company Yule night. There were the receptionists whom Violet knew very little of, and the postal workers who armed the sorting shelves and postal carts, including Mr Roland who delivered Violet’s very first letter to her and now gave her a friendly familiar nod, and the Auto Memory Dolls, and the president himself, standing at the head of the table like an army general ready to make a speech.

“My friends,” he said, “we celebrate Yule later than intended, but we celebrate it with every worker of the CH Postal Company present with us. We celebrate the end of the longest night, and the knowledge that there will be light after it. This first year of the CH Postal Company has not been easy, and I thank you all for sharing it with me. The four year war, for many of us, seemed like the longest, hardest night, but with the signing of the peace treaty between Leidenschaftlich and the Galdarik Empire, which members of our own company were party to, we will sing up the dawn.”

Claudia raised his bottle of apple cider.

“My friends. To the dawn of Leiden and the dawn of the CH Postal Company.”

Violet mimicked the raising of the bottles of wine and cider and drank solemnly.

And with that done, Claudia clapped his hands together. “Right then! I was promised that if we printed wassailing books for everyone, there would be wassailing! Where are the booklet—oh, thank you Iris dear, yes, yes, hand them out—Benedict, come back here. All together now!”

---

“You… can’t sing,” President Hodgins said, what seemed to be a few hours later.

Violet had difficulty keeping track of the time – but there had been no need to, in a toasty warm room where the only thing holding her attention were the wassailing booklets, and the dinner, and the many apples Cattleya had put in her hands and insisted she twist the stems off of. There was no wonder the Major had wanted Yule to be a properly done thing, once the war was over, with a proper meal in a proper house, instead of tins of corned beef and hardtack in the lull between fighting.

“I’ve never needed to sing before,” Violet explained. The mulled wine left her pleasantly warm. She was holding a lighted red candle in her adamant silver hands, and humming the tune to The Wassail Bowl. It was, Iris had gently suggested, the best thing she could be doing, because they all heavily discouraged her from singing. “Given the opportunity to practice, I am certain I could excel and make you proud of it, President Hodgins.”

“No! No, no, it’s quite alright,” Claudia said, with the air of fretting that reminded her of the day he had retrieved her from the military hospital, shoved three toys in her face and ordered her to pick out one. “I’m more surprised to know that there are things you do not excel at.”

Violet remembered cooking cabonara for a playwright. It was good enough for a first attempt, he had said, but his face said that it was not good enough to encourage nourishment if she were assigned to cooking daily.

“Please!” Claudia continued dramatically, “Please, do not burden your work as an Auto Memory Doll with learning to sing on the side. I don’t think we’ll need that, no, unless singing telegrams becomes a trend in Leiden again.”

“You demonstrate an excellent entrepreneurial spirit, president. If it puts you at ease, I also do not excel at cooking.”

“Say, what?”

Violet relayed her first day of work with Oscar Webster in detail, omitting nothing on how he was inebriated, working in a living space where there were more books off the bookshelf than on it, and requesting her services in cooking dinner on that first night. Claudia took it in very solemnly and at the end of it, buried his face in his hands.

“We need to charge clients more if they think an Auto Memory Doll can be hired for that.”

“I finished the play I was employed to scribe, and with my support, he exhibited creativity to develop crucial scenes. I consider this a great success.”

Claudia chuckled. “And so, she excels at playing a muse too.”

“President Hodgins?”

He patted her arm paternally. “Forgive me, Violet dear. I might be becoming maudlin, so late in the evening.”

“I don’t understand,” Violet said. It was a good evening, as far as she understood it. How it compared to other properly timed Yule parties, she did not know, but she enjoyed the apple spells, and the aged spice cake, and to sing The Morning Star is Risen with the receptionists, and, in Cattleya’s words, to hum and hold her lighted red candle like a praying maiden in a cathedral.

“I expect you knew little about Yule because it is an old tradition, and Leiden is one of the few old cities that keep to it. Mastig have their Thanksgiving, Eustitia celebrates their festivals on changing star charts and lunar calendars, and the northern countries prefer the new year instead of the end of the old. That, and Gilbert would not have found space for Yule in the middle of the war. Am I correct?”

“Yes, president.”

“Did you understand why we celebrate Yule then?” Claudia raised his bottle in a toast to the ceiling. “I wanted to put a chandelier up there, you know, in the old Leiden traditions. Imagine how that’d look to bring for this year’s Yule.”

“We sing up the dawn,” Violet repeated solemnly. They were good words, and shouted before a battle, they would have made a rousing speech.

“And other reasons. Yule falls around the time of the winter solstice, and after that, the days become longer and the nights become shorter. In the old practices of Leidenschaftlich, they call it the shedding off the darker half of the year for the brighter half. Don’t tell that to my parents though, they’d never believe it, the bankers,” he added with a shudder.

It was a statement with humour. Violet understood that at this time, she was expected to laugh, but could not.

“With the official ending of the war, I felt that we have finally put away some long dark nights of our lives. With Yule, you celebrate the end of the dark and the start of the light with friends.”

And abruptly, Violet understood.

“You’re thinking of the Major.”

The Major was always in her own mind, because he had never left it. It was the Major’s further orders that kept her hope up for a hundred and twelve days in the military hospital at Enciel, and the knowledge that he was alive against the naysaying of President Hodgins and Naval Captain Bougainvillea that fed that hope. There would be a season where they would meet again, and Violet hoped that season would be soon.

Winter, even, she thought, for Yule or Thanksgiving or Leiden’s new year air show.

“I talked about giving him a job after the war, you know,” President Hodgins continued. “Well, of course you know. You were there when I offered it to him,” although she had been little more than a background prop there, Major Bougainvillea’s silent shadow and bodyguard.

“You offered me a new occupation then too,” Violet said. In Enciel, she had remembered it too, and it had been congruent with what Claudia said was the Major’s orders. It had ensured her compliance.

“I thought…” Claudia murmured against the mouth of his bottle, which seemed more like to be mulled wine than apple cider now, “I thought Gilbert would be here. Celebrating Yule. Writing a letter in the new year air show. With us, in the CH Postal Company. Not a chapter to be remembered about in Leiden’s military history, not yet. It feels like the world has forgotten him already, when he should be here still.”

They were silent.

Finally, Violet said, “He’s not gone. President Hodgins. The Major—he’s not gone.”

President Hodgins had long given up arguing that with her, so she went on, “I understand you feel sure that he is lost, but there was no body at Intense. When I think of the Major, I feel he must be out there, somewhere, making his way back to Leiden. The Major may be slow in his journey, but he must be making it.”

“You think so?”

He drained his bottle and set it down, eyes fixed to ground.

“I know it to be so.” Violet declared. “It is in my instincts as a soldier,” and she blew her candle out, “and I know it as well as an Auto Memory Doll knows the ways of the heart,” and fixed her hands around her emerald-green brooch, “and I feel it, as certain as the dawn will be sang up every year at Yule. If we remember Major Gilbert Bougainvillea, it won’t matter if he is late in celebrating this year’s Yule or next year’s Yule with us.”

She placed her hand on his shoulder.

Claudia looked up at her. Slowly, his mouth picked up in a tired smile.

“Is that so? As certain as the dawn – you might excel at poetry someday, Violet dear.”

“I will study it, if that is your wish, president,” she vowed.

He set his hand over hers, and patted it reassuringly.

“To our new days then,” Claudia said, and then whisking out a new bottle of cider, gathered the CH Postal Company into a last song of the night.

---

Writing notes:

Since the Violet Evergarden universe is very German, I’m surprised there was an out of left field air show, and no Christmas or Yule at the end of the season, especially because there’s an emphasis on the new year and Cattleya and Benedict are being ferried out to the peace talks in the middle of the snow. This is a seasonal fluff fic to remedy that – inspired in part by Lillirith’s Season of Grace. As with her, Vienna Teng’s The Atheist Christmas Carol has always dug my heart out with a blunt knife.

Since Violet Evergarden is set in a quasi-WWI period, Gilbert is referring to the 1914 Christmas truces that happened at the Western Front (also, the subject of the film, Joyeux Noel)

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